I have my books and my poetry to protect me

Maybe I should be a Trainer Rather Than A Consultant

I have been doing my consultancy business for just over a year now.  It is going okay, in the sense that I have very nearly as much money now as I did this time last year, and there is every prospect that I will be earning more than when I had a job in the fairly near future.  So neither a catastrophic failure nor a runaway success.  I hasn't turned out quite how I expected though, so I have to confess that the modest results are down to luck rather than judgement.  In other words, when I took the plunge there was a real possibility that I would now be looking back on a year of failure and disappointment.

Getting The Most Done With Your Time Part 5 - Affirmations

One of the factors my experiment into working practices is looking at is affirmations.   This is the idea that continually repeating a mantra throughout the day leads you on to greater achievement.  This is the factor I have the least confidence in.  It smacks a bit of woo and nonsense like the Law of Attraction.  Surely our brains are too complex to be manipulated so easily by such a low effort trick?

Getting The Most Done With Your Time Part 4 - Metrics

This blog used to get no readers at all.  Since I started promoting it on Twitter a bit, it has started to get a few viewers and is now getting the odd referral from Google.  Hi guys.  You are still a small, select group.  But I hope you are enjoying it and finding it useful.  I don't plan on optimising this blog to get as many readers as possible or seeking out compelling content to build traffic or anything like that.  However, I think it only fair to keep the handful of running stories going so that I don't leave things hanging.  To which end, the working methods experiment I am working on has developed a bit since I last wrote about it, so here is an update.

What To Do When Your Company Makes People Redundant

I can't really complain about how my career as an employee worked out, but I did manage to work for several companies who went through cycles of redundancies.  In every case the redundancies were done in a piecemeal fashion, at least at first.  In no case did they turn the company around and save the remaining jobs.  I was never senior enough to be privy to the whole story, but in every case it seemed to me at the time that they contributed to rather than ameliorated any problems.  In one case I am reasonably sure that they were a major factor in destabilising the company and making recovery impossible.

Get In The Mood For Maximum Productivity

One of the most popular works that the composer Handel came up with in his own lifetime was Alexander's Feast.  In those days getting a piece of music into print was a rare feat, and only two of Handel's masterpieces were published in that format while he was still alive: Messiah naturally enough and Alexander's Feast.

Planning - Upping the Ante

My planning process is working pretty okay now.  I am keeping track of where I am spending time.  It isn't perfect but it is working.  I have lists of projects and activities and I am keeping on top of them.  And I am reducing the amount of time I waste.  So it is all good.  But I have to be realistic.  I have a pretty poor track record of keeping up with planning and every other planning system I have used has eventually, and always within six months, collapsed when it became too big an overhead.  Even when they work well they are hard to keep going on.